Comments on the French Work Life Balance

Writing in the Groan (yes, I know…) James Bennett criticises the French.

I love France. I’m half French and bilingual, have a French mother and dual nationality. Every summer we travelled across the channel on the ferry to France to see my relatives in a beautiful time-forgotten Burgundy village, where everyone knew each other and life tasted as a sweet as the freshly baked bread my grandmother sent me to collect every morning. It was the best childhood anyone could ever imagine. As I said, I love everything French.

Or rather I did. A week after coming back from my first holiday in Normandy with my wife, her two sisters and their four children, my affection for the country has been forever tarnished. Why? Because the French almost ruined it for us all, that’s why.

What did those nasty French coves do to ruin it for James, we wonder?

Despite the country posting a slight recovery last quarter, France is still well and truly mired in recession. Its unemployment rate is currently running at 8.2%, one of the highest in western Europe, and is expected to go above 10% by the end of this year. And yet among all this financial misery and economic turmoil is a country in which people have rapidly descended into a state of supreme bone idleness but who equally demand second-to-none social welfare, lower taxes, benefits and a high standard of living.

Ever since the 35-hour working week was adopted in February 2000 under prime minister Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, France has become a nation of languid retailers, invisible tourism employees and workshy shopkeepers. Try and find a cafe open in peak tourist season on a Monday, Wednesday or Sunday in Normandy and I’ll break into the Louvre and deliver the Mona Lisa to you by hand. Even if you do manage to catch someone selling something in a shop or restaurant in France, they’ll probably turn you away as they shirk off for a two-and-a-half hour lunch break.

For someone who is half French, I would have thought he would know better. My experience of France is that it has always been thus. Indeed, the French attitude to work (that it isn’t the be all and end all) is in part what I find so attractive about the place. Okay, a French artisan operates on a different space time continuum to the rest of us, but things do get done…eventually.

Since moving here, I have adopted the same relaxed approach to life. I could, had I remained in the UK, pretty much double my income – the work’s there if I want it, but there are things I value more. A two and a half hour lunch break is certainly more pleasant than a sandwich grabbed during a ten minute hiatus as is the norm when I work in the UK. The Anglo Saxon work ethic is not the only one and it is not necessarily the best one. I watched my father-in-law die before he reached retirement age. So, too, did I watch erstwhile colleagues, following forty years of graft, expire either shortly before or following their retirement. I may not reach retirement, but if not, I will, at least, have enjoyed my summers in the sun. There are other things in life than money and work. The French understand this. James Bennett appears not to.

Vive la France.